Too Late. I'm Married to the Godfather novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Stairwell

Carly tells Giancarlo for the first time what happened in a parking-garage stairwell the night of the soda-can tab, and at dawn a ring from Grayson waits on their stoop.

I made it to the car before my hands started shaking.

Giancarlo's driver pulled away from the curb. Rocco was buckled into his booster between us, already half asleep with Steve the T-rex under his chin.

Giancarlo watched me try to put the tab back into my wallet.

I missed the coin pocket twice.

He took the wallet out of my hands, slid the tab in and snapped it shut.

"What stairs?" he said.

"Not here."

He looked at Rocco, then at the back of the driver's head.

"Okay," he said. "Not here."

He held my hand across our son's lap all the way over the bridge.

Nonna was waiting in the kitchen of the brownstone with the lights on and a pot of something on the stove.

She was eighty-four and four foot ten, and she ran the house.

"You're late," she told Giancarlo. Then she saw my face and swore in Italian. "Who?"

"Nobody, Nonna."

"Nobody doesn't make you that color. Sit. Eat."

"I need to put Rocco down."

"I'll put him down." She held out her arms. "Come, little prince. We'll say goodnight to the Pope."

Rocco went to her sleepily. "We don't have a Pope."

"We have a picture of the Pope. Same thing."

She carried him up the stairs, talking the whole way.

Giancarlo poured me a glass of red and set it in front of me at the long kitchen table.

He didn't sit. He leaned against the counter with his arms folded and waited.

My husband was the most patient man I had ever met. I'd seen him wait out a city councilman, a hurricane and a four-year-old's tantrum without changing his face.

"The night of the tab," I said.

"The rooftop. I know."

"You don't know all of it."

I took a sip of the wine. It didn't help.

"I left right after. The elevators were packed with his party, so I took the stairs in the garage. The east stairs."

He went still.

"Two men were waiting on the landing of level three. One grabbed me from behind. He tore my dress at the shoulder. The other one held up a phone and took pictures."

I said it fast.

"I had my car key between my fingers. I hit the first one in the face as hard as I could. I heard his nose break."

I held up my left hand and showed him the little white scar on my thumb.

"That's from the key."

"You told me that was a scalpel," Giancarlo said quietly.

"I lied. I ran down four flights and out into the street in one shoe. The police took a report. They never found anybody."

The kitchen was so quiet I could hear Nonna singing upstairs.

"Who else knows?" Giancarlo said.

"Nobody. I never told anyone." I looked at the wine. "Until a woman I haven't seen in five years whispered it in your lobby."

He uncrossed his arms.

He walked to the window and looked out at Nonna's garden in the dark.

When he turned around, his face was calm.

That was the frightening one. I'd only seen it twice.

"I'll have her in a room by midnight," he said. "And him by one."

"No."

"Carly."

"No bodies, Giancarlo." I stood up. "Promise me."

"She sent two men after my wife."

"She sent two men after a twenty-five-year-old resident with forty dollars in her account. I handled them then." My voice cracked. "I'm handling her now. It's mine. I want it said out loud in front of the people who laughed. I don't want her to disappear. I want her to answer."

He looked at me for a long time.

"You didn't trust me with it," he said. "Four and a half years."

"I didn't trust anybody with it."

"I'm not anybody."

"I know." I crossed the kitchen to him. "That's why I'm asking you instead of hiding it."

His jaw worked.

Then he took my face in both of his hands, carefully, the way he held Rocco's.

"No bodies," he said. "Until you say."

"I'm never going to say."

"Then never."

He kissed my forehead. Then my mouth.

I pulled him closer by his tie.

I didn't want to be the girl in the stairwell anymore. I wanted to be the woman whose husband had looked at a man in a gray suit and ended him with one sentence.

"Take me upstairs," I said.

He picked me up off my feet.

"Your parka smells like the ER," he said against my neck.

"Then take it off me."

He carried me up the stairs with one arm under my knees and the other locked around my back, and I worked at his tie before we reached the landing.

"You're going to strangle me," he said.

"I'm going to undress you. Try to keep up."

The bedroom door was open.

The lamp was on.

The window was cracked and the cold coming through it smelled like October and the river.

He set me down by the bed.

I got the tie off and dropped it on the floor.

Then I pushed him.

Not hard.

Just hard enough that the backs of his knees hit the bed and he sat, looking up at me with that patient, dangerous face.

"Take this off," I said, and held out my arm.

He peeled the parka off me slowly, one sleeve at a time, and let it fall.

His hands went to my hips.

I caught his wrists.

"No," I said. "You had your turn in the lobby. Now it's mine."

His mouth curved.

"Is that what this is?"

"Shut up, Giancarlo."

"Doc."

I shoved him flat on his back.

He went, not because I could move him, but because he wanted to see what I'd do next.

I climbed onto the bed and straddled his thighs, still in my stained scrubs, and started on the buttons of his shirt.

One by one, while he watched me and didn't touch anything.

I pushed the shirt open.

His chest was broad and dark with hair, and the long knife scar along his left ribs caught the lamp light.

The one I stitched.

I put my mouth on it.

He made a sound low in his chest, his hand coming up to the back of my head.

"I remember this," I said against his skin. "I remember you bleeding on my table, telling my attending to get out of his own ER."

"I was polite about it."

"You were not."

He laughed, and the laugh turned into a grunt when I bit the skin just under the scar.

I sat back and pulled my scrub top over my head.

My bra was plain white cotton, and his eyes went to it like I'd worn it for him.

Maybe I had.

Maybe I had worn it for him every night for four and a half years.

"Pants," I said.

He lifted his hips and I worked his belt open, his zipper down, pulled his trousers and boxers off together and threw them on the floor somewhere.

He was hard already, his cock thick against his stomach, and I let myself look.

I let him see me look.

"Take off the rest," he said.

"Ask nicer."

"Take off the rest, Doc."

"Better."

I unhooked my bra and dropped it off the side of the bed.

Then I stood on the mattress, one foot on either side of his hips, and pushed my scrub pants and underwear down to my ankles and kicked them away.

I was naked over him, and the cold from the window went over my skin like water.

"Come here," he said.

"No."

I lowered myself onto him slowly, my knees on either side of his ribs, and took his cock in my hand.

He was hot and hard and I stroked him once, just to feel him twitch in my palm.

"I've been thinking about this since the lobby," I said. "Since you walked out of that elevator and said take your hands off my wife."

"I meant it."

"I know you did."

I lifted up and guided him against me, and I didn't wait.

I sank down onto his cock, all of him, until I was sitting flush in his lap.

We both stopped breathing.

"Christ," he said.

I braced my hands on his chest and started to move.

Slow at first, rocking, letting my body adjust to him.

He filled me so completely it stole the words out of my mouth.

"Look at you," he said, his voice rough. "Taking what you want."

"I always do."

"No." His hands came up and gripped my hips hard enough to bruise. "You always wait. Not tonight."

He was right.

I had waited for everything.

For the truth.

For the right moment.

For permission to be angry.

Not tonight.

I rode him harder, my hair coming loose from the clip and falling around my shoulders.

The freckles on my chest were flushed, I could feel the heat climbing up my throat.

He watched me the whole time, his dark eyes on my face, and I let him watch.

"Tell me what you want," he said.

"This."

"Tell me."

"I want to feel you inside me. I want to come on your cock with your name in my mouth. I want to be the woman you married, not the girl on the landing."

His grip tightened.

"You were never just the girl on the landing."

"I know that now."

I rode him faster, my clit catching against his body on every stroke, and the pleasure built low and tight in my belly.

He sat up suddenly, one arm around my back, and his mouth found my neck.

I cried out.

"Say it," he said against my skin.

"Giancarlo."

"Say whose you are."

"Yours."

He bit my shoulder and I moaned, my nails digging into his shoulders.

"Yours," I said again, and it came out like a confession.

It was a confession.

I had spent four and a half years being Dr. Ames, nobody's anything but Rocco's mother.

But I was his.

I had been his since the night I stitched him up and told him he'd wait in line like everyone else.

He flipped us without warning.

One second I was on top, and the next my back hit the sheets and he was over me, his weight pressing me into the mattress, his cock still inside me.

"My turn," he said.

"Thank God."

He laughed, low and dark, and pulled almost all the way out.

Then he fucked me the way he'd promised.

No bodies, until I said.

But this was not about bodies.

This was about his hands pinning my wrists to the bed.

This was about his mouth on my throat and his cock driving into me so deep I stopped thinking.

"Who do you belong to?" he said.

"You."

"Say my full name."

"Giancarlo Marchese."

"Again."

"Giancarlo Marchese. Giancarlo Marchese."

He fucked me through the words, hard and rhythmic, the headboard knocking against the wall.

I didn't care if the whole street heard.

"Donna," he said against my ear. "You're the Donna of this house. You're the Donna of every room I own in this city. And you're mine."

"Yes."

"Beg for it."

"I want it. Please."

"Please what?"

"Please fuck me harder. Please make me come. Please, Giancarlo."

He let go of my wrists and grabbed my hips, tilting me up to meet him, and I wrapped my legs around his waist.

The angle changed and I screamed.

"There it is," he said, not stopping, not slowing. "That's my sound."

He was right.

The sound was mine.

The sob that came before it was mine too.

I didn't know when I'd started crying.

Maybe when he'd said the word Donna.

Maybe when I'd said the word yours.

He fucked me through the sob, and the sob turned into a moan, and the moan built into something that had no name.

I came with his cock buried inside me and his mouth over mine, swallowing the sound.

It rolled through me in long, brutal waves, and he kept moving, kept pushing, until I was shaking underneath him and begging for breath.

He pulled out and turned me onto my stomach.

"Up," he said.

I got onto my knees.

He came over me, his chest against my back, and pushed back inside in one stroke.

I buried my face in the pillow and screamed again.

"Quiet," he said, with a smile in his voice. "Rocco."

"I don't care."

"Liar."

He fucked me from behind, one hand braced by my head and the other between my legs, his fingers working my clit while his cock pounded into me.

I was already overstimulated, already wrecked, and the second orgasm hit me like a wave I didn't see.

"Giancarlo, fuck, I'm coming again."

"I know you are."

I came on his cock with his name breaking in my throat, and this time he followed, slamming into me once, twice, and then going rigid with a grunt torn out of his chest.

He came hot inside me, and I felt every pulse of his cum, my pussy clenching around him like it was trying to keep him there.

We collapsed together.

He stayed on top of me for a long moment, his breath ragged against my shoulder, his heart pounding against my back.

Then he rolled off and pulled me into his arms.

The sheets were tangled around us, and the window still let in the cold.

I didn't feel it.

His hand found my left hand in the dark and spread his palm over mine.

His thumb pressed over the little white scar on my thumb.

"Donna Marchese," he said.

"Don't get used to it."

"Too late."

I woke at six because my body didn't know how to sleep in.

Giancarlo was still asleep on his stomach, one arm thrown across my side of the bed.

I slid out from under it, pulled on his shirt and went down to make coffee before Rocco woke up and demanded pancakes shaped like a stegosaurus.

The kitchen was dark and cold.

Through the glass of the front door I could see the sky over Carroll Street going pink.

There was something on the top step of the stoop.

I opened the door in my bare feet.

It was a small velvet box, dark blue, tied with a white ribbon.

There was a card tucked under the ribbon.

I knew the handwriting. I had read it on birthday cards for three years.

I opened the box.

A diamond ring sat in the satin, big and square and cold.

Next to it, pressed into the slot beside the ring, was the pull tab from a soda can.

The card said: "Let me give you the real one. G."

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